Catch and release goals
Once
you've figured out your shared long-term
goals, it's much
easier to
break those goals into bite-size segments. We like to choose ten
big picture goals to work on each year, taking the top-ranked two or
three goals out of each category. You can see our 2009 and 2010 goals in past posts.
Now for the important
part --- let your long term list do all of the
worrying about goals not on this year's agenda. If something
didn't make it onto your list for this year, forget about it!
This rule will hold true for the other lists I'll discuss this week too.
Ten
goals may not sound like much to put on your agenda for a solid
year, but it's important to realize that life on a farm takes a lot of
work just to stay afloat. During the growing season, we spent
almost no time working on long term goals, filling our days with
weeding, harvesting, mowing, killing chickens, and so forth
instead. Even
in the winter, splitting wood and cooking from scratch use up a
considerable amount of time. If anything, I would recommend that
folks just getting started on the farm cut back to half a dozen long
term goals for the first few years rather than expanding to a score,
only to see your dreams dashed.
In fact, one of my
biggest pieces of advice for type A homesteaders is
--- always put only half as many projects on any list as you think you
can complete in the slated period of 
time.
You'll feel really,
really good if you complete everything on your list and can work ahead,
while you'll feel just as terrible if you only get a third of your list
done. Why not prime the pump of happiness rather than despair?
It also helps to lower
your standards a bit and realize that it's not
essential for your farm to look like the pictures in the glossy
magazines, at least not at first. The most fun part of farming is
figuring it all out, so why rush through the early days in search of an
elusive goal when you could be taking a process-oriented approach and experiencing
bliss?
| This post is part of our Coping With Paradise lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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